Business Thinking for Designers

Chapter 5
Communicate 
the options
How effective communication helps business partners 
understand design

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Communicate the options
As mentioned in Chapters 3 and 4, increasing organizational 
trust is a matter of getting to know your business, your 
business partners, and aligning your work to viability. In reality 
though, those steps alone are not enough, because your 
partners are suffering from decision fatigue. 
Decision fatigue is when the quality of decision-making 
deteriorates simply because there are too many decisions 
to be made. But designers can help the situation through 
effective communication.
The ability to communicate clearly is the single most 
important skill you can develop to mature decision-making 
in your organization and relieve decision fatigue. Effective 
communication helps your business partners better 
understand the opportunities and risks that design identifies. 
For all the value they could create, too often 
designers appear naive in the face of genuinely 
understanding cultures of decision-making, of 

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Communicate the options
how an inability to generate political capital can 
undermine their ability to deliver change.
Dan Hill, 
Author of Dark Matter and 
Trojan Horses: a strategic 
design vocabulary
The first step to effective communication is to use languages 
and structures that are already valued by others. This will 
help gain trust and influence and lead to more support from 
business partners (rather than grievances). It’s only when that 
trust is gained that iterating on the language and structures 
themselves will be accepted.
This chapter focuses on communication. We’ll review 
alternative structures for: 
• Storytelling
• Presenting
• Analysis
• Negotiation
• Gauging ambition

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Communicate the options
Lori Kaplan from Atlassian on creating engagement with cross-
functional teams (Watch online)